“I think people responded to [Hurricane Katrina] the best way they can,” 50 told ContactMusic.com. “What Kanye West was saying, I don’t know where that came from.” Instead, 50 said, “The New Orleans disaster was meant to happen. It was an act of God.”

Cook concludes: "Maybe Chuck D can sit 50 down on his knee, and tell him about one of the greatest MCs ever: W.E.B. DuBois."

On the upside, even if Chuck's brand of polemical, politicized rap took a direct hit from the "guns, hos and money"-fixated Republican rappers, a few vital signs persist.

On the downside, Hot 97 ( WQHT, at 97.1 FM), the most listened to hip-hop/rap station in NYC, pulled the plug on underground hip-hop artist Boots Riley of The Coup's "World Can't Wait, Drive Out the Bush Regime" promo for the 11/2 Union Square demonstration against the war in Iraq and the Bush Administration’s policies. Listen to Boots droppin' some real political science here.

I'm sick of America getting a bad rap from miserable "artists" like Boots Riley. He belongs in a capitalism-free cave in Tora Bora, spewing his "poetry" around an al Qaeda campfire. But I'm even sicker of Riley's cultural defenders in the elite media. Sept. 11 brought home the lesson that vile ideas have bloody consequences -- no matter how "daggone funky" they may sound to mush-headed music critics. We continue to ignore the intellectual enablers of anti-Americanism at our peril.